From the POTSDAM INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE IMPACT RESEARCH (PIK)
How the darkness and the cold killed the dinosaurs
66 million years ago, the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs started the ascent of the mammals, ultimately resulting in humankind’s reign on Earth. Climate scientists now reconstructed how tiny droplets of sulfuric acid formed high up in the air after the well-known impact of a large asteroid and blocking the sunlight for several years, had a profound influence on life on Earth. Plants died, and death spread through the food web. Previous theories focused on the shorter-lived dust ejected by the impact. The new computer simulations show that the droplets resulted in long-lasting cooling, a likely contributor to the death of land-living dinosaurs. An additional kill mechanism might have been a vigorous mixing of the oceans, caused by the surface cooling, severely disturbing marine ecosystems.
“The big chill following the impact of the asteroid that formed the
crater in Mexico is a turning point in Earth history,” says Julia Brugger from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), lead author of the study to be published today in the Geophysical Research Letters. “We can now contribute new insights for understanding the much debated ultimate cause for the demise of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous era.” To investigate the phenomenon, the scientists for the first time used a specific kind of computer simulation normally applied in different contexts, a climate model coupling atmosphere, ocean and sea ice. They build on research showing that sulfur- bearing gases that evaporated from the violent asteroid impact on our planet’s surface were the main factor for blocking the sunlight and cooling down Earth.In the tropics, annual mean temperature fell from 27 to 5 degrees Celsius
“It became cold, I mean, really cold,” says Brugger. Global annual mean surface air temperature dropped by at least 26 degrees Celsius. The dinosaurs were used to living in a lush climate. After the asteroid’s impact, the annual average temperature was below freezing point for about 3 years. Evidently, the ice caps expanded. Even in the tropics, annual mean temperatures went from 27 degrees to mere 5 degrees. “The long-term cooling caused by the sulfate aerosols was much more important for the mass extinction than the dust that stays in the atmosphere for only a relatively short time. It was also more important than local events like the extreme heat close to the impact, wildfires or tsunamis,” says co-author Georg Feulner who leads the research team at PIK. It took the climate about 30 years to recover, the scientists found.
In addition to this, ocean circulation became disturbed. Surface waters cooled down, thereby becoming denser and hence heavier. While these cooler water masses sank into the depths, warmer water from deeper ocean layers rose to the surface, carrying nutrients that likely led to massive blooms of algae, the scientists argue. It is conceivable that these algal blooms produced toxic substances, further affecting life at the coasts. Yet in any case, marine ecosystems were severely shaken up, and this likely contributed to the extinction of species in the oceans, like the ammonites.
“It illustrates how important the climate is for all lifeforms on our planet”
The dinosaurs, until then the masters of the Earth, made space for the rise of the mammals, and eventually humankind. The study of Earth’s past also shows that efforts to study future threats by asteroids have more than just academic interest. “It is fascinating to see how evolution is partly driven by an accident like an asteroid’s impact – mass extinctions show that life on Earth is vulnerable,” says Feulner. “It also illustrates how important the climate is for all lifeforms on our planet. Ironically today, the most immediate threat is not from natural cooling but from human-made global warming.”
###
Article: Brugger, J., Feulner, G., Petri, S. (2017): Baby, it’s cold outside: Climate model simulations of the effects of the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous. Geophysical Research Letters [DOI:10.1002/2016GL072241]
Weblink to the article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GL072241/abstract
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So the big rock that hit the ocean didn’t contribute to the mixing of the ocean?
Obviously I’m no rocket surgeon but it seems like that would mix water a lot faster and more thoroughly than the mixing that would also occur due to the cooling. Seems the two might even be linked.
What are these plankton blooms that grow in cold water without sunlight ??
So once again it’s “models and simulations all the way down”… Excuse me if I don’t bother reading much further than that.
This is the saddest part of the climate science fiasco.
Models aren’t bad, but they have been misused. As a result many people are now reflexively rejecting all models, without bothering to think it through.
george, total darkness would have only lasted a few weeks. After most of the dust settled out, it would have been more like very heavy clouds for the next few years, gradually returning to normal.
“cooler water masses sank into the depths,
warmer water from deeper ocean layers rose to the surface, carrying nutrients that likely led to massive blooms of algae, the scientists argue.
It is conceivable that these algal blooms produced toxic substances,”.
______________________________________
Please leave them PIKs one good trial following 99 errors.
When them’s carrying Owls to Athens.
The rock hit in the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf is relatively shallow and there are lots of islands isolating it from the Atlantic and the Pacific. (This was before the isthmus of Panama had closed.)
The strike would have created a huge tsunami, but away from shores, a tsunami is just a pulse that moves through the water, it doesn’t distrub the water.
There would have been a huge amount of mixing within a few hundred miles of the impact. Beyond that, much less mixing.
No mention of the Deccan Traps.
There’s those Pesky sulphuric acid droplets again. Damn things make rain drops which becomes acid rain.
Trouble is, that acid rain is down on the ground; not up in the sky blocking the sun.
What could possibly be wrong with this picture ??
Oh ! I see it’s just a computer simulation. Had me worried for a while.
They need to ask their computer to look for something that stays up there and blocks the sun, but doesn’t make rain drops, which will just wash the gunk away.
g
I could never get past that defect in the nuclear winter scenario. No particles in the upper atmosphere are going to stay for a thousand years. The air is too thin to hold it up. Labeling it global warming/climate change doesn’t alter the fundamental fault.
PS, I think the way the asteroid impact is thought to have worked was by causing spalling to break large sheets of surface rock off the opposite side of the Earth. This would have opened up gigantic sheets of magma, which would have spewed toxic chemicals out for millennia.
So what does the solar spectrum absorption of sulphuric acid look like.
With the supercooled atmosphere even in the tropics, there aren’t going to be any H2O clouds; it will all rain out. So if the sky is dark, to block solar energy from penetrating the ocean depths and keeping it warm, the sulphuric acid has to be blocking sunlight.
Sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere have a much longer residence time due to low dew point and lack of regular mixing. It is stratified..hence the name. Do you recall the Pinatubo sunsets? Same thing.
I fear major impactors more than anything else. They are out there and most of the research is mom and pop. People doing it on their own, pointing telescopes up to take images with hypered CUDs, then post processing the data with home written software.
The stratosphere is above the rain clouds.
No mention of the Shiva crater.
Where did all the sulfur come from?
Computer models only tell a story derived from the data chosen to go into them.
It almost certainly doesn’t exist.
The Chicxulub region is especially rich in gypsum (CaSO4 ·2H2O) and other sulfur-containing minerals
No it isn’t. There is some Early Cretaceous anhydrite but not very much. The idea that there is extensive gypsum/anhydrite deposits is due to misinterpreting impact breccias containing excavated anhydrite as being bedded deposits.
Quoting article:
And just how “high up” …….. was “high up in the air”?
sulfuric acid – H2SO4 — colorless —- soluble in water
If that large asteroid “impact” occurred in Mexico or the Gulf of Mexico, and it blew tons of particulate into the upper atmosphere, …… just how did sufficient quantities of said “particulate” (H2SO4) manage to get South of the Equator to cause a “blocking” of Sunlight in the Southern Hemisphere?
http://www.dannyzeff.com/schooltoolsclassic/enviro/wind.h2.jpg
Now iffen that asteroid “impact” destroyed 50% to 80% of the CO2 in the atmosphere, then “yup”, that would have caused the demise of the dinosaurs. The large herbivores would have quickly (geologic wise) ran out of food and the large predators would have quickly followed suite.
Actually such a large impact would eject huge amounts of junk into high ballistic trajectories or even very eccentric orbits. It would fall back over several days. Remember that there is a fairly substantial fallout layer from the impact even in New Zealand.
They use models that demonstrably fail to predict the effect of CO2, an extensively studied, well mapped gas known to be in the atmosphere. They posit that the impact would produce lots of sulfates (there is an Iridium layer, not a sulfate layer worldwide).
This work was worth doing nonetheless.
https://geosciencebigpicture.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/geophysical-research-letters-volume-issue-2016-doi-10-10022f2016gl072241-brugger-julia-feulner-georg-petri-stefan-baby-its-cold-outside-climate-model-simulations-of-the-eff.pdf (Thank you for Sci-Hub, Steven)
Its conclusions are reasonable and far less overwrought in the actual publication than the press release.
They conclude: “The temperature evolution for the different CO2 emissions resulting from the impact is very similar”; and “we cannot conclude from our model results that the impact was exclusively responsible for the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous”.
Their citations demonstrate a serious effort to integrate paleontological and proxy evidence. This is not your typical braindead CO2 screed publication.
First thoughts:
Humankind’s reign??
I think bacteria and then maybe ants and cockroaches would disagree.
More thoughts:
Cold kills. Wamer, meh. not so much.
It’s obvious to me that 66 Mya this planet was nothing like it is today with continents in different places, maybe lower rotational obliquity extremes, slighlty higher atmospheric pressure.
66 Mya uncertainties for those factors alone makes drawing any 1-3 deg C climate conclusions about today’s change of 3pp 10,000 CO2 to 4 pp 10,000 quite dubious. Any “scientist” who claims they know with certainty is a charlatan looking for rent money.
First thoughts: GIGO
Its a computer muddle, therefore Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Second thought, even at 4 parts in 10,000: – to the nearest one tenth of one percent, there is 0 CO2 in the atmosphere.
Or Loch Ness Monster droppings, of course; this being climate junk science., based on GIGO, as noted.
Auto
Arguments based on scarcity are doomed to failure (often).
When a pestilence produces a specific result that is an intrinsic property of that substance, and when the effect takes place at the atomic level, scarcity is no guaranty of immunity.
Ever wondered why nobody ever seems to mention the capture crossection of a photon; say one in the 87meV energy range.
How close does a 15 micron photon have to come to a CO2 molecule to get captured ??.
I have never seen a number for the capture range for any photon by any atom or molecule.
Maybe there is no such range limit.
Well electromagnetic fields seem to invade all of space, and don’t seem to have any trouble finding a single CO2 molecule if one is present.
I don’t know the answer; I’m not a quantum mechanic. But it seems to me that a single CO2 molecule surrounded by about 13 layers of other molecules between it and its nearest CO2 neighbor molecule in the atmosphere, easily finds a 15 micron photon passing by and grabs it.
So don’t fall into the trap of thinking that one molecule in 2500 can’t do anything.
The real question is how damaging is the result.
In MHO the answer is ” virtually inconsequential “.
Earth is warmed by solar energy reaching the condensed surface, and getting converted to waste heat; the garbage of the energy spectrum.
Satellites that measure the solar radiation that strikes the upper atmosphere and gets rejected back to space as solar spectrum energy, cannot tell us how much of the remaining solar spectrum energy makes it to the condensed surface and converted to heat.
Fortunately there is an exquisite world wide measuring system that measures the total amount of solar spectrum energy that reaches the condensed surface and is converted to heat.
The common acronym for that system is …… EARTH …..
Yes the planet itself captures the solar energy that reaches the surface and is not simply reflected by materials that are unable to absorb 100% of it.
The effect of that energy converted to heat is to establish the Temperature of those absorbing materials.
According to Kevin Trenberth, the total amount of that heat generated never changes, and he is embarrassed that they can’t find any change in the earth’s heat content.
The Argo buoys seem to confirm that result.
Evidently the cloud feedback is quite effective in maintaining the heat content of the condensed earth.
G
Fuelner’s last sentence ensured he got paid by one of the many funds specifically set up to reward papers that warn humankind of the treat of global warming. Otherwise a very interesting paper.
I have yet to see a mass extinction from a 2-4 degree temp change….yet this piece of work compares global warming to mass extinctions
And they wonder why people aren’t paying attention any more
Er, it was 24 degrees, 5c degree temperatures at the Tropics.
Julian Ironically today, the most immediate threat is not from natural cooling but from human-made global warming.”
They base their extension theory on a 24 C drop in temp. and then in the last sentence throw it out the window! It is flawed.
Thé missing ” h ” gives a whole new meaning to global warming ! Happy accident or intent?
🙂
Malc, I finally hunted it down didn’t see your observation was to Brent but yes LOL
“Climate” is important to every lifeform on the planet. Gee, who knew? Let’s contemplate life without “climate”, or the sound of one hand clapping, or other impossible things.
“. . . sulfur- bearing gases that evaporated from the violent asteroid impact . . .” Is this even quantifiable? And can the amount of sulfur in the atmosphere both pre and post asteroid event be reliably known? Nice idea, but the assumption dials ranges need mentioning.
….the sulfur in the atmosphere is the weak point. How many tons of sulfur would be needed to cool Earth by 26 C? The cooling is correct, but there is no sulfate layer
in the ground for this event…… forget the sulfur for this cooling event, this is only model play…….
The cooling has a different cause, see http://www.knowledgeminer.eu/climate-papers.html
Maybe the asteroid brought the sulfur with it. That’s as good an explanation as any. Certainly as good as this paper.
I note that the killer cold does not show up in the do18 isotope data and the CO2 shows nothing.
The issue that is not talked about enough is what happens when all that ejecta blasted into orbit returns as meteorites back to Earth. The calculations show that it would have heated up the atmosphere to 300C or more and everything that could catch fire, did indeed catch fire, dinosaurs included. Ocean temperatures got to crazy numbers as well. You needed to be in some safe place like a mine or a burrow or a lucky sheltered ocean cove or the deep ocean to survive this pyre.
Nice idea Bill, but where’s the spike in CO2 from all that burning? Or the dO18 from the killer heat? If “Killer cold” doesn’t show up; the same argument says “killer heat” doesn’t show up either. You can’t have it both ways.
Of course, the counter argument to both is – the duration of the cold/hot period was too short to show up in the usual proxies. On that graph, 800 pixels represent 55 my so 30 years would be 4.4E-4 pixels wide.
Bill, maybe 30 years is too short to be resolved in the isotope data from that far back? Is there a layer of ash from all the fires? I haven’t read about one. My guess is that intense atmospheric heat, enough to cause fires, was probably limited to less that 10% of the earth’s surface. Since heat rises quickly, most of the heat would be aloft. Fires may also have been generated by lots of hot rocks and boulders falling back to the earth hundreds or even thousands of miles from the impact, although I’m not sure there is evidence for this.
There were huge tropical forests, giant sequoas everywhere, high levels of CO2 which made everything grow huge. The plants generated high levels of O2 so it was pretty easy for everything to firestorm.
Surely there is an obvious spike in the sulfate amounts in the fossils. Very acidic rain. There would have to be at least a spike in fossils of fresh water mollusc’s.
I possibly should have read this before posting – http://www.livescience.com/38453-freshwater-species-survived-mass-extinction.html
Apparently, fresh water species survived better. Not exactly consistent with enough sulfuric acid in the atmosphere to cause such massive cooling for several years …
… or the little buggers can handle a large drop in pH quite well.
But – but . . . . the drop from IIRC pH 8.2 to pH 8.0 [both decidedly base] has got the true believers’ knickers in a terrific twist.
All the sea-things will die by next Tuesday or some such nonsense, if I read their tragic please for more money correctly.
Much more grant money [and global control] needed to untwist them, it appears!
Goodness!
mods – /Sarc.
Just in case . . . . .
Auto – still near the good French wine.
Fat Finger.
Please – ‘pleas’ – [or was it the dreaded Autocorrect?]. Sorry.
It is true that it is very hard to proof-read your own work.
Auto corrected.
And outside a glass of French red wine.
Umm.. yes there is an increased amount of fusain (=soot) in post-impact layers, but it isn’t possible to say whether from huge fires immediately after the impact, or from dead, dry forests burning down over a few decades.
You do not give a source for that graph – where did you get it from??
Plenty of dinosaurs evolved into modern birds, also many type of crocodiles and lizards are still here today
.
“Plenty of dinosaurs evolved into modern birds…”
Huh? How could anyone [possibly know such a thing?
(Evolution theory evolved into climate change theory, me thinks ; )
Foot structure? Mammals have five digits. Even horses although they are all combined into a hoof. Bats and whales too. But birds? Well, Silky chickens have polydactyl traits…but so do some inbred domestic cats and people. One cannot use exceptions on genetic traits to prove evolution. Still the oviviparous nature of birds is a good clue of their origin. And precocious- atricial split was also seen in dinosaurs.
Science can conclude with high confidence that birds are dinosaurs because that’s what the evidence shows.
The only argument that a few ornithologists had against the overwhelming evidence for dino origins and for the forlorn hope that birds might descend from archosaurs close to dinosaurs rather than from maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs had to do with their fingers, but that problem has been solved.
Keith,
Birds, like their maniraptoran dinosaur kin, have three fingers, down from the original five in Triassic dinos. Two are usually fused in birds, but the first digit or alula (little wing), is feathered and movable, to act as a leading edge slat at high angles of attack.
As among the smallest dinos, birds had the best shot at survival, but only those with toothless beaks made it through the catastrophe. This might be because they ate seeds.
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)30249-4
The birds were most likely already there. It’s not all that clear to me what the difference is between a feathered dinosaur and a bird. But there were pretty clearly feathered critters that could fly for many tens of millions of years before the KT extinction event.
Yes, birds had already evolved from their maniraptoran dino ancestors long before the K/T extinction. Most birds were also wiped out at that time, but the previously minor group of modern birds survived.
The distinctions between birds and their maniraptoran kin are few. There are various definitions of “bird”, but clade Aves requires a beak, keeled sternum and tail bones fused into a pygostyle (parson’s nose). Teeth are optional. Modern birds lack them but many of their Cretaceous kin still sported hen’s teeth.
Don K
January 14, 2017 at 1:16 am
Indeed it is fairly arbitrary as to where you draw the line between feathered dinobird and ‘bird’. Some dinobirds could glide or even fly under power and some birds had already lost the ability to fly by 66 million years ago, like the seabird Hesperornis.
Here’s a cladogram of the dinobirds, showing the shared derived traits of various groups:
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/wp-content/blogs.dir/471/files/2012/04/i-e739d6024d965bc896f1d32910ccebb3-Holtz%20Eumaniraptora%20cladogram.jpg
Martin,
Are crocs and lizards ‘dino-aves-type’ creatures?
We also have tortoises, turtles and tuataras [What a Rock Band name?!??] – but they, too, I suggest are not the fast growing, warm-blooded types that are in Class Dinoaves.
Auto, a fascinated reader of Robert Bakker’s ‘The Dinosaur Heresies,book from 1986.
Auto,
Crocs and birds (plus other dinosaurs and pterosaurs) belong to the group of reptiles called archosaurs. Lizards, snakes and tuataras are lepidosaurs. The position of turtles was controversial until genetic studies showed them more closely related to archosaurs.
Ye Gods! More modelling posing as fact.
Disclaimer- I haven’t read this paper. Buuuuttt… The way the output movie looks, it would appear that they did not actually model the sulfate being sourced from the impact point. They seem to have just dumped the change onto the atmosphere, via simulation magic. Even in an event of this magnitude, I would expect a significant NH vs SH bias. I’m a little skeptical…
Yes have to agree.
This looks more like “ice age” cooling, rather then due to a impact.
Should be “Eventually,” right?
Should be, “ice caps developed”, as there shouldn’t have been ice caps at this point…
“Ironically today, the most immediate threat is not from natural cooling but from human-made global warming.””
Always have to bow to the gods of globull warming to keep the grant money coming in.
In fact they are totally wrong on that one. Cooling is the greater threat and when our inter-glacial ends …..
” … the most immediate threat is not from natural cooling but from human-made global warming.”
If he is correct (which doubt), and the MOST immediate threat is from human-made global warming, I don’t have to worry about anything and I can sleep tonight.
If he is wrong, then I need to cut more fire wood. It’s almost noon, the sun is shinning, blue skys in all directions, its almost up to 32 degrees, And it’s gonna be this way for a while longer (I need to cut more fire wood even if he is right).
The Dinosaur lived then died during extreme cold temperatures which preserved his bones as they were laid to rest in the earth
Sunlight came back and gave the earth warmth life and growth
Born of that the trees waters and bones began its new transformation
The Mesoxoic Era, during which the non-avian dinos lived, was much warmer than now.
And to think that sulfate aerosols are one of the proposed geoengineering methods for “curing” supposedly anthropogenic global warming.
Some questions with this statement:
“While these cooler water masses sank into the depths, warmer water from deeper ocean layers rose to the surface, carrying nutrients that likely led to massive blooms of algae, the scientists argue.”
Present-day abyssal ocean temperatures remain very cold, fed by cold hypersaline water descending to the depths and toward the equator primarily from Antarctica. If this process existed back then (note cold poles
shown in animation), then deep ocean layers would have been colder, not warmer.
Equatorial water disturbed by the comet would have to be denser than polar water to penetrate the pycnocline (density-cline) do the hypothesized convection.
” If this process existed back then (note cold poles shown in animation), then deep ocean layers would have been colder, not warmer.”
It did not. The very cold deep ocean only started during the Early Oligocene, about 35 million years ago, when Antarctica first became fully glaciated and production of cold arctic bottom water also started. Before that the deep oceans were much warmer. At the K/Pg-boundary Antarctica had a cold-temperate climate and was forested along the coasts, though there were probably icecaps inland.
The reflected solar rays would seriously impact oceanic recharge, leaving an ocean starved for heat for a long time, setting up clear sky conditions and net absorption. Net absorption, while serving to recharge ocean heat, leaves land cold. That is until the oceans switch over to net evaporation, belching that heat out to warm the land and green things up with concomitant humidity.
The proposal seems reasonable.
“It also illustrates how important the climate is for all lifeforms on our planet. Ironically today, the most immediate threat is not from natural cooling but from human-made global warming”.
=========================================
W. C. Fields allegedly said something along the lines of ‘the world is a dangerous place, we’ll all be lucky to get out of it alive’.
Below a CO2 concentration of ~150 ppm everything is dead; comparing the climate and CO2 records in deep time to the more detailed relatively recent past of 500,000 years, it looks like a series of last rallies or last gasps, a planet in it’s death throws maybe melodramatically rescued at the last moment.
They could also be death throes.
This is something I’ve been wondering for awhile. Life consumes and stores co2, All the fossil fuels. all the coal, all the chalk, etc, is trapped Co2. The logical consequence seems to be that without intelligent life to modify the trend the planet would eventually reach a level where life as we know it would die off.
If that theory could be shown to be viable, then would it not make sense for the benefit off life on this planet for us to increase the levels as high as we can, giving the world a few more hundreds of millions of years of potential as a life bearing globe?
Why assume there were no intelligent dinosaurs at that time? We have still only dug up a fraction of the species that existed. There could have been an entire civilization present. No building materials would have survived over 100s of millions of years.
Stone building materials last about as long as stone, and in any case would have been buried. Plus, the Mesozoic ended only 66 Ma, not hundreds of millions of years ago.
There were no non-avian dinosaurs as intelligent as the smartest mammals and birds today. But some were scarily smart enough.
Hard to tell which way this one will go.
I saw this in a movie once. These guys had to blow up an asteroid and Bruce Willis saved the world….
Was Bruce the dinosaur in that one?
Did he wear a white vest? Terry Gilliam positively banned him from wearing a white vest in the Twelve Monkeys.
I was once taught by a Miss Willis. About 1962. Any connection?
Auto, intrigued.
seems the dinosaurs evolved with ever bigger bellies and smaller brains… could history repeat itself?
Mike: Like Bugs Bunny, I resemble that remark.
+1!
It took the climate about 30 years to recover, the scientists found.
Further proof that climatic feedbacks are net negative. If the cagw theory were true, the sudden drop in temperatures would have led to a decrease in CO₂ and an increase in albedo, which would have led to runaway global cooling.
I wonder why it is that climate scientists feel the need to make fools of themselves. They are drawn to half baked theory like rats to garbage.
With apologies to said rodents.
Lucius hits a really important point about the dangerous ideas in the AGW community about attempting planet “engineering” to combat alleged human induced global warming. Some time back it was even seriously suggested by someone who should be given his own padded room with only plastic knives and forks that we should fire thousands of small mirrors into orbit so as to reduce the amount of solar radiation entering the atmosphere. As a piece of complete deranged madness I think this is possibly the most dangerous idea I have heard in this whole AGW saga.
Apart from screwing around with something that may be completely beyond our ability to fully understand for a long time to come and possibly sending us into a permanent snowball Earth, the least hugely damaging result would have been to jeopardise astronomy and space research from Earth’s surface. Yet as I recall the idea received plaudits in some newspapers.
The whole dinosaur extinction debate seems to resolve around which way people prefer to kill off the dinosaurs, personally I think most of the various bits of evidence came together to cod the job and few are mutually exclusive. I see no reason why the massive impact should not have set off the extreme volcanic activity of the Deccan traps. I know there is an objection on the grounds of the radioactivity dating that these two events are linked, but this makes me wonder about how accurate we can really be with something that happened about 65 may.
But of course we know that the dinosaurs really died out because they smoked too many cigarettes.
Marlborosaurus rex?
And the genetic failure that was the Masturdon.
Moderately,
The Traps were not then antipodal to the Yucatan impact. The flood basalts in India occurred because the Indian plate was passing over the Reunion Island hotspot. The eruptions were not caused by the impact.
Do not cod – must stop worrying about the local tidal surge predicted to wash up on my lawn that never happened last night.
Just another exercise in creating panic in the population. When there really was a disaster in the UK and all those poor people in Somerset got flooded out of their homes, or trapped in them, they didn’t roll the army out for weeks on end to rescue them. This time round, they made a big show of deploying the troops for an event that didn’t happen, and they probably knew it wouldn’t happen. They just want to get people used to seeing troops about the place. Is this part of the bigger picture of preparing us all for Martial Law, or am I just being paranoid?
Ahhh, The Precautionary Principle taken to the far end of the bell curve.
At least not like 1953. That, tragically, left hundreds dead in England, and nearly 2000 dead in the Netherlands.
From the fount of all wisdom, Wikipedia, which even a bum-boatie like me can edit:
“After the 1953 flood, governments realised that similar infrequent but devastating events were possible in the future”
Precautionary principle is prime, when practically placed and positively pursued.
Auto, agreeably alliterative. Arguably!
Their map. Has any one checked some of the maps guessed at for the KT event. Theirs don’t look right. How do you model the KT event without a realistic map. I am not nitpicking.
What is the ocean heights that the T- waves will travel through post impact. Will the T-waves drown out the flash fires.
If that is the map they are in fact using for their model , then they have wasted time and resources.
michael
It looks close.
Check out Scotese’s Paleomap projecy
http://www.scotese.com/K/t.htm
What Ice Caps?
There were no ice caps at this time as the the earth’s evrage temperature was around 25C.
If they have used their GCM for this “prediction” the only thing that is certain is that it will be wrong.